One of the new groups on deviantART got busted this week because it displayed an artistic nude on its avatar. The avatar had been used for months with no incident until some anonymous person reported it.
Anyone can report anything online. A friend of mine with a power blog that brings 1.5 million readers each month lost her Moderate rating based on an anonymous report. Loss of the Moderate rating cost contributions to a charity she was supporting. She stands to lose 85,000 new visitors a month if the situation is not rectified. At this point, she is still trying to figure out how her blog has offended someone.
If you google "online citizen reports," you will discover online reporting is the new anonymous way to "narc" someone. What could be better for anonymity than the Internet? Anyone can open an untraceable account; how do policing authorities even know who these people are? Oh, silly me! The identity of an informant doesn't matter; remember the medieval witch hunts? The accused had no right to face their accusers or to even know who accused them.
The important thing in witch hunts historically is simply to "get a name."
The reporting system on deviantART lends itself to this "citizen report" system. Since the site is huge, and the deviant police could never patrol all the accounts, you can pretty much do whatever you like as long as no one reports you. I have seen the work of talented artists removed for rule violations while totally despicable, inartistic rule-breaking work goes unreported. The person reported often is the victim of a personal vendetta or has had the misfortune to get the attention of one of many under-18 members who regularly look at nude work they allegedly despise for the sole purpose of reporting and/or complaining about it.
An online report removes any worries of a traceable phone number or a letter with a return address and fingerprints on it. You can now conceivably accuse anyone of anything with no accountability. Think of the boon this is for the spiteful, the prejudiced, the vengeful!
At the same time, the Internet gives unlimited license to libel someone else. Just try to get an investigation of a personal ad hominem attack! Another model and I have been victims of ageist remarks. You can report a personal ad hominem attack as well as ageist and racist remarks on deviantART, but the investigative process is long and drawn-out. Meanwhile, you are being crucified on the site with no recourse, and reports of such abuse seldom result in any action. Verbal attacks are looked upon with much less seriousness than the random posting of a crotch shot although they are far more damaging.
In bloggie world, many of us put up the orange cautionary notices voluntarily to avoid "church lady" reports of the mature content on our sites. If you wait to be reported, you may end up with a 'mature content' interstitial.
Unfortunately, the Internet endows its citizens with the reporting power to ruin individual reputations, sack a charity, and bring down a highly popular blog. While it's OK for someone's private life to be openly discussed by online bullies, a fine art nude group cannot put a fine art nude on its avatar.
7 comments:
There's a bit of a bias among legitimate (as opposed to... crappy) nude photographers and models against people who report policy violations because a) they refuse to acknowledge the policy on dA which doesn't permit whatever they did, or b) they feel like censorship is evil.
If it's against policy, it's against policy.
I also disagree with the idea that censorship doesn't have a VALID place.
On deviantart, the anonymity is mostly so that people who simply refuse to accept the rules can't retaliate maliciously. (high profile deviants with many watchers who perceive anything as an insult have a tendency to use their throngs of mindless supporters as attack dogs.)
It CAN be, and IS often abused, though.
But it is not exclusively used for abuse.
Point of Order: if you are seeing policy violations and not reporting them, then that is why they persist.
You are not reporting them.
You are not significantly different from another person.
Another person is not reporting them.
Another person is not significantly different from anyone else.
Nobody is reporting them.
I suggest that we (me, you, your other readers) make a pact to always report violations, and never report things frivolously/vindictively. Together, we can (probably not) make a difference!
Wonderful post UL and so very thought provoking. Hatebunny, I could not agree with you more. Having been on Deviant Art for a while I have noticed that it is often the place where devious - no pun intended - smear campaigns are started by 'deviants' about other 'deviants', for one reason or the other but, alas, more often than not motivated by personal jealousy and vindictiveness. Thus people's personal lives are publicly dissected and discussed in great detail, often soliciting sympathy from supporters who simply because they happen to like a deviant's artistic output are ready to take at face value everything the deviant says, without having any means to ascertain the veracity of the deviant's assertions. Everyone has a right to privacy and indulging in such lengthy and often mindlessly abusive speculations is definitely a policy violation (hate campaigns against an individual comes to mind) that should be reported. Unfortunately the system does not work fast enough and often by the time action is taken a lot of damage has already been done.
As you say, Dr L, this is happening all over the internet. It is a very popular pastime for teenagers at U.K. secondary schools to report perfectly innocent school teachers to MySpace, Facebook moderators and other online forums. The kids find it fun to spread malicious rumours (usually related to the teacher being involved in drugs or underage sex) and try to ruin a teacher's career, reputation and livelihood just for the hell of it. No wonder so many teachers are quitting their profession over here.
As your post clearly illustrates, adults are no different and the online art world is a particularly nasty kettle of fish. The increasing trend towards trusting anonymous reports from internet trolls is wrecking lives.
The internet is humanity's new God and is proving to be a vengeful and spiteful deity. It can choose to break a person on a whim, just because it can.
This is one of many reasons I quit other photo/art sites like DA and have not started anything there. Somethings are not worth giving my time, talent, and energy to be a part of or to save.
Here is a link to a graphic novel artist who is planning to quit the internet. Interesting reading.
http://www.slate.com/id/2249562/entry/2249563/
Thank you for your responses, everyone. Lin, since its inception, as strictly a college communication system, facebook has given students a venue to strike out at teachers they don't like. When facebook opened to younger students in high schools and now grade schools no less, the false accusations were sure to multiply. The whole problem, once again, is the citizen reporting system.
It is insidious, and you are right it is no less than insidious in the art community. You and I have witnessed bullying attacks upon individual artists that led to real-life nervous breakdowns and creative paralysis.
And that's my point exactly. Online bullying has real-life consequences, sometimes regarding life and death, and verbal attacks have yet to be taken seriously enough.
Karl, I followed your link, and it certainly hit home with me. I hope you stay with your conviction not to be saddled with the online addiction!
Re DA: I find it amusing that people, young or not, apparently come to the site and don't expect to find nudity or art with an erotic flavor. I mean, what did they expect from a site called "deviantART"?! *lol*
Hatebunny, where I and other fans (I make no claim to being a visual artist of any sort, although I have modeled in the nude on occasion) get frustrated is not that there are policies, which as you say are a form of censorship; it's that they're so capriciously enforced. I understand that on so large a site, the administrators have to rely mostly on "citizen reporting," but that does make for spotty policy enforcement, and that always seems capricious. And yes, cyberbullies don't make things any easier.
Yes, Jochanaan, as you explain so well, rules are not uniformly enforced because of the nature of the enforcement tool - citizen reports. It is the inherent unfairness of something like "DA police" acting on citizen reports that strikes me as a tad too close to "Gestapo." If you don't like someone, you "finger" them, and we all infringe on something or someone at least once.
Yet, when someone writes in his journal that he may just have to "go round" and kill a model, and you know he has the non-virtual proximity to do this, DA refuses to do a thing.
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